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There was an event at Michaela School the weekend before last. You can watch videos of it here. One of the points that stuck out for me was when Deputy Headteacher, Barry Smith, complained about the “lies” he was told when he was being trained to teach. I thought this was interesting because, even though we should expect teacher trainers to be experienced classroom practitioners who have also had every opportunity to study education, we tend to assume that when they tell us things that aren’t true then they are being sincere. We don’t question whether they actually believe it.

This lead to a bit of a discussion on Twitter which, with the help of @5N_Afzal, I present below. The general consensus was that teachers are told a lot of untruths by those training them, (I didn’t specify initial teacher training so this could also include INSET) but that we should give those that pass on the misinformation the benefit of the doubt about it being an honest mistake.

We all know that praise in marking is a good thing, don’t we? Many marking policies assure us that children need a “what went well” or “two stars” to encourage them. Not true, says the English teacher who wrote this post…

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I think what I most noticed was how little disagreement there was. 10 years ago this was probably the hottest issue in education and the types of views I’m expressing would have been seen as outrageous and I would have been told I needed to be sacked or retrained. Amazing to see how things have moved on.

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According to this post, it was recently claimed on Twitter that “neo-trads” ignore the issue of engagement. I can’t claim to know who is or is not a “neo-trad”, but there have been plenty of blogposts about engagement written from a broadly traditionalist perspective (although I make that as a claim about the posts rather than individual authors). Here are 12 of them:

If one were to plough through all these, one would find a lot of similar points. In particular:

The word “engagement” is not used consistently. For example, it can be used to mean being occupied, interested or entertained. Definitions often change mid-conversation. More precision is needed to discuss what mental states and attitudes are most conducive to learning.

General statements about what does or does not engage (by any definition) have a habit of not being true for all students, or all classes, making it hard to justify any type of pedagogy on the basis of engagement, even if, for some definition of “engagement” there were grounds to adopt it as an aim.

I’m happy to conclude that the issue of engagement is not some kind of blind spot for traditionalists. Please let me know if I’ve missed any posts or any important arguments.

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A post to the OFSTED blog about myths yesterday, included three videos in which OFSTED luminaries sought to set the record straight about inspections. I thought I’d publicise them and, just in case you can’t be bothered to watch them, or your school blocks Youtube but not my blog (what are you thinking?), there is a transcript below each one.

London Director of Schools, Mike Sheridan on preparing for inspections:

When we go into great schools, we tend to see that they are focused on the young people that they serve. They’re not looking to see what Ofsted wants. They’re looking to see what their children need and this is really refreshing and inspectors are very capable of really recognising the difference that those processes and systems make for the young. It’s rare that we go into a school and we find that superficial and so we don’t want schools to be worrying about the process of want schools to be going through ‘Mocksteds’. Of course you want schools to understand where they are. We want them to be able to evaluate where they are. We want them to be able to use this evaluation to be able to improve further. There’s no one way of doing things and it’s really important that teachers and leaders find the best way for the communities that they serve.

Deputy Director for Schools, Joanna Hall on feedback:

There’s no particular expectation about seeing written records from oral feedback. The most important thing is, do the pupils understand the feedback, do they act on the feedback, and how does that have an impact on their learning?

Deputy Director for Schools, Joanna Hall on grades:

Ofsted doesn’t grade lessons anymore. We might visit a whole range of lessons, talk to leaders about the quality of teaching, talk to staff and talk to pupils. The most important thing is: what’s the impact of teaching, learning and assessment on pupils’ progress.

I think most of this is stuff that schools need to get the message about. There’s still too much nonsense imposed on schools on the basis that OFSTED will want to see it (some recent examples here and here). However, there is one bit of these videos that worries me: the part in the second video where Joanna Hall asks “do they [students] act on the feedback…?”. While, technically, students improving and not repeating mistakes is evidence of acting on feedback, schools now seem utterly convinced that the only way to demonstrate student response to feedback is to have “interactive” marking policies that involve students responding to teachers. I don’t think that OFSTED require this sort of “triple marking” or the multi-coloured pens it so often involves (see here) but that comment in the video is only going to encourage schools to introduce such policies. I think greater clarity about how OFSTED will look for evidence of students acting on feedback would be useful.

Update:

A twitter response from OFSTED national director, Sean Harford, which will hopefully come as a relief to a lot of teachers:

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I don’t have a particularly good track record for this sort of thing, and there’s often something of a hidden agenda behind awards for blogging of any description, but I’d be silly not to at least ask people to vote in the online poll for the Edublog Awards.

You can vote once a day per IP address (hmmmm… can anyone see a flaw in this?). You should be able to find me under “Best Tweeter” (as @oldandrewuk) and “Best Individual blog” (as teachingbattleground.wordpress.com). You may also want to consider the Labour Teachers blog I edit as best group blog. Also, in a spirit of patriotism, I should probably point out some other British entries listed. mrhistoire.com and mylyonsmaths.wordpress.com are available to vote for under “Best New Blog”. mrhistoire.com, huntingenglish.com and solvemymaths.com are under “Best Teacher Blog”. headguruteacher.com is listed under “Best Administrator Blog”. Let me know if there are any other British bloggers included in categories where they are not up against me and I’ll add them to this list. You do not have to vote in every category.